Announcement: This Week At The Science Circle: "Catalysis in Wonderland"

"Organic chemistry tends to follow certain rules. Starting in the 1950’s,
we began to find ways that transition metals (e.g. chromium, iron,
nickel, rhodium, gold and many others) could bend the rules of classic
organic chemistry and facilitate chemical transformations which would
otherwise be onerous. One example of the utility of transition metals as
applied to organic chemistry is in catalysis, i.e. the transformation
of starting materials into products through an easy-to-traverse sequence
of steps. Today, catalysts mediate a wide range of reactions, from
improving the quality of air (e.g. catalytic converters) to the
production of plastics, medicines and other chemical transformations. In
this talk we will cover the basics of “organometallic” catalysis
reactions such as “oxidative addition”, “insertion”, and reductive
elimination. We will use these steps to illustrate how a metal can
catalyze a reaction without itself being changed, through lecture and
scripted objects. What we have learned about catalysts which dissolve
has helped us to understand how metal surfaces mediate similar
transformations."